Apple Promises iOS 5 Update In A Few Weeks To Suck Less Battery Life

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard the same thing over and over again. “The iPhone 4S is awesome, but…” And it’s a big “but”. The battery life. It sucks.

Well, to be clear, it sucks for some users, but not all. For example, I’m not noticing anything out of the ordinary on my device. It’s essentially the same battery life I got with the iPhone 4 running iOS 4, as far as I can tell. But today Apple has acknowledged that some bugs are causing some issues with the battery life. But they say it’s not an iPhone 4S issue, but rather an iOS 5 issue. In other words, it’s software, not hardware. More importantly, a fix is coming.

“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks,” an Apple spokesperson told us today over the phone.

“In a few weeks” sounds a bit vague, but it may actually be a bit sooner than that. This afternoon, Apple issued the first iOS 5.0.1 builds to developers. Guess what’s included? Yep — “Fixes bugs affecting battery life “. They’ll need to test this build with developers for a bit to ensure there are no other bugs, but assuming that goes well, this should be out soon.

In the meantime, we published some tips yesterday to help with battery issues if you’re having them. Again, the good news here is that this is a software issue in iOS 5, nothing fundamentally wrong with the iPhone 4S.